Ratko Mladić, convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in a U.N.-designated “safe area” of Bosnia, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two, has died, a U.N. official said on Thursday.
\n\nMladić, who was serving a life sentence on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, died in a U.N. prison hospital in The Hague, Netherlands, a spokesperson confirmed.
\n\nA U.N. statement said that Dutch authorities “have commenced the standard procedures and investigations required under Dutch national law,” while Judge Graciela Gatti Santana of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals has “ordered a full inquiry.”
\n\nThe slaughter in Srebrenica was the grisly culmination of a war that had lasted over three years, in which the general pounded the besieged capital Sarajevo daily with the artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machine guns of his nationalist Serb army, killing 10,000.
\n\nThe dead from Srebrenica were bulldozed into mass graves over four days in July 1995, some of them dug up and relocated to remote mountains so as to hide evidence of the killings.
\n\nThe goal, as determined by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was “ethnic cleansing” —…
Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/